Daughters of the River Huong

by Uyen Nicole Duong

  And of course, more and more casual dating to camouflage the maiden’s mind-set.

  19. RENDEZVOUS IN NEW YORK CITY

  At the beginning of 1990, the year of my thirty-fifth birthday, I heard from André for the first time since that snowy night in November of 1975. Seeing his handwriting after years of despair and longing, my heart raced as though I were about to faint. Disappointingly, his letter was short, and no contact information was given, except for a return address with a postal box in Paris:

  Si, for years I have never stopped thinking about you. Kept in touch with your mother occasionally, enough to know about your graduation from Columbia Law. If you are unattached, please consider going back to Vietnam for a visit with me, now that the government has opened doors to the West. André.

  Despite my overwhelming emotions, I knew that, realistically, I could not make the trip. I was at the peak of my law practice, which filled up my days, hours, and minutes. So I wrote him back, despondent and full of regret, asking him if he could delay the trip.

  I kept writing to the postal box in Paris. There was never a reply.

  I heard from André again that same year, this time by phone, about two months before my thirty-fifth birthday in November. The phone call was made from Vietnam. He had made the trip without me.

  The phone line was frequently interrupted with static, and obviously our conversation was monitored by the operator. I could hear clicking noises and even heard the operator’s voice cutting in occasionally.

  “It’s probably the government,” André said.

  He sounded like a stranger, his voice feeble and nervous. Occasionally he lost his train of thought as though it were hard for him to concentrate. Words got caught in my throat and I, too, had difficulty expressing myself. Still calling me “bébé,” he asked whether I was involved with anyone. No, no, no. No one, I said.

  He asked to spend time with me upon his return from Vietnam, assuring me that there were good reasons why he had never replied to any of my letters. My hope was full and high when he mentioned that on the way from Vietnam back to Paris, he would stop by New York. There would be so much to tell, and share.

  So we made a date to meet in New York City. We blocked out a week as a start. He said he could call at the beginning of that week, once he got to New York City. We could spend that whole week together, and perhaps more, I thought.

  In the following days, I relived the sensations of my life in Vietnam and my teenage days in Paris. I went to my safe-deposit box and retrieved André’s poem about the black rose and cherished every single word. I recalled the moment of languor when I spread myself on the tiny bathroom floor reading it. I dreamed of my hands resting in his hands, his breath on my nipples, our legs intertwined, and my long black hair falling all over his shoulder blades—all those things I had dreamed of giving to André but never had the chance to bring to life.

  In anticipation of our reunion, I looked for my copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and read “Recueillement” until I fell asleep. I looked forward to André’s arrival with the naïve and bubbling heart of a young girl falling in love for the first time, expecting to see his brown eyes, dashing smile and lean frame. I expected my angel to descend on my life again—this time, no longer with French dolls, but instead a suitcase of memories from the garden of my childhood. Days passed in anticipation and nervousness. I dialed wrong phone numbers, made typos on documents, and forgot my keys. I even put my contacts into the wrong eyes and mismatched stockings. I caught myself staring at the empty space, smiling vaguely as I filled my head with thoughts about André. My heart palpitated from all the André longing that could not be diffused or controlled with my daily routines. Sitting in a restaurant or walking through Saks Fifth Avenue or Central Park, I would perk up every time I saw a slender, virile-looking male with Mediterranean good looks and dark brown hair.

  I existed in that high-strung state until the week our rendezvous finally arrived, but André’s phone call never came during the first part of the week, contrary to his promise.

  For the entire week, I checked with my secretary and the building concierge constantly, leaving instructions on my whereabouts, inquiring about any unexpected visitors. At night, I listened to my answering machine over and over, hoping to hear his French accent and husky voice.

  Finally by Thursday of that week, the wait wore out, and disappointment sank in. Then vibrant New York City became dead and dull, like my law practice. On Thursday night, I plunged into a depression and had difficulty getting out of bed Friday morning. In sorrow, I concluded that he had decided to do without me. To make up for the void, on Friday morning I started making phone calls to round up a date for the weekend, hoping to recommence the fill-in-the-blank dating ritual with some superficial man about whom I did not care.

  By the end of business Friday, when all hopes had vanished, I gathered my strength to resume my routines. I was leaving my office, down the hallway, hoping to head to the gym, when I heard my name being paged by the law firm’s main receptionist.

  “Ms. Sanders, please call your secretary. There is an emergency call for you,” the pager said.

  I almost twisted my ankle on my high heels as I whirled around and headed back to my office. Too anxious to finish the walk, I stopped at a secretary’s station and picked up the line.

  “Simone,” my secretary said, “I am glad I caught you in time. There is a man on the line who speaks both French and English. He sounds urgent and upset. He said you were supposed to meet him, and pleaded for me to find you. I think this must be the friend that you are anticipating.”

  “Will you put him through right away?” I said in one breath. “And please, don’t cut him off.”

  A moment passed, seemingly an eternity, and then I heard André’s voice, too far away, too soft, too hesitant, and too fragile to be real. “Hello, Simone? Simone, Simone, Simone,” he repeated my name several times as though to assure himself that I existed at the other end of the line. “Are you there, are you there at all?”

  “Of course, I am here, André. I’ve been waiting all week,” I said, reproachfully. “Oh, André. I can’t describe what it meant to wait for you.”

  I heard myself sounding sullen and resentful, just like the old days, when I was still a little girl and could not get my way with him. The past reeled through my head, our pony rides, the recitation of poetry, all such sweet times in my mother’s blossoming garden of Hue and her patio in Saigon’s District Eight. My hand trembled and I wanted to cry.

  “Where have you been, and when did you arrive in New York, André? Why didn’t you call me sooner? I almost gave up!” I pouted like a little girl.

  He told me, barely coherently, that he had been in New York all week, but had not felt well. So he had stayed in a small hotel, avoiding sunlight, and did not have the courage to call me. “Please forgive me, Simone. Just forgive. May I see you now? I am leaving for Paris in the morning.”

  Something had clearly gone wrong for him. I did not know whether I should be joyous or sad. He had been here all week, and all the time we could have together was Friday night?

  I tried to hide my disappointment and stay calm. “Where are you now and where can we meet, André?”

  “I’ve been wandering around Manhattan all day thinking about what to do, Simone. About whether to see you, to tell you, all about, well, things…” He sounded broken on the end of the line. “I am somewhere near Orchard and Delancy, right outside of Chinatown.”

  It was getting dark when I emerged from the subway station. My feet ached from all the running and walking in a rush. I dashed my eyes around to look for André. He was nowhere to be found. I stood by the subway entrance, on high heels, in a heavy cashmere coat. Another wait, another eternity. I decided to walk around the block looking for him. Just before I started to move, a skinny old man approached me.

  The man was gray and feeble, almost staggering in the cold evening hours of New York. I saw disheveled salt-and-pepper
hair, and dark circles under bloodshot eyes that stared without looking, and looked without seeing. I instinctively moved away from the old man when he leaned forward, almost falling onto me with one skinny arm extending in an effort to touch. He lost the momentum and raised his eyes to meet mine. At first glance, I did not recognize him, until I backed away again and looked, from a distance, with a frown. He was holding a book in one hand.

  André stood before me, but gone were the lean muscles of a young man. Hollow chest. Hollow cheeks. Hollow eye sockets. The skin on his face tauter. Wrinkled eyes, saddened by the fact that I had backed away.

  It took a moment for me to get over the shock. I approached him and took his hand. It felt dry, trembling, and cold.

  It was a time of awkward reacquaintance. I felt alien toward him. But gradually the bond of childhood somehow thickened and filled the space between us. In an instant, I realized how time could be too slow and too fast. In Hue and Saigon, I had longed in frustration to grow inches taller so the top of my head could reach André’s chest, and time was hatefully slow then. In adulthood, all of a sudden, while I failed to notice, the velocity of time swept away all youth, beauty, and vitality. Like Princess Mi Nuong of the Vietnamese folklore, who had to see the man’s ugly face that trapped the beautiful voice she loved, I had to see how time had damaged the beautiful image of a man.

  “André,” I babbled, “in 1975, I made a mistake. I should have gone with you to Paris.”

  He shook his head and put his hand over my mouth.

  We spoke very little after that, just small sentences, but I could tell he was very depressed and agitated, as though a threshold had been reached and he was desperately holding on to me as an anchor. He said he had come to my building and spoken to the concierge, who told him I was at work. Like a madman, he had wandered around Manhattan for hours before he had he courage to call my office.

  It was the irrational, desperate act of a dying fish gasping for air, a man wandering around Manhattan in the early evening rush hour.

  I asked him if he would want something to drink or eat, but he only wanted to walk. So we walked in the cold of a New York winter night. As we passed a row of brownstones, he stopped and held my face with his hands. People were passing by and he stood there, the lifeless eyes affixed to my face, his two hands awkwardly framing my cheekbones. He told me I was a beautiful woman, as he had always predicted I would be, and that I would remain beautiful for a long time after he was gone.

  And then he started talking as though he were reciting Baudelaire again, with such intensity it was hard to follow. He talked of those days in Paris, when, between bouts of drinking, he had shut himself off from the world and a vibrant City of Light. In those moments, America, France, and Indochina all rejected him and let him down. He talked about how his law practice had crumbled, how he had tried to get Dominique back, how manuscripts had been rejected and the motivation to work was reduced to zero, how difficult the struggle had been, how the world and his friends had all turned against him.

  The book he wanted to write was never finished. He talked of how the Foucault brothers and sisters had bitterly fought over the division of property and estate, and how the Foucault empire had tumbled down, its connection to Indochina reduced to the past glory of a colonial industry.

  He talked of his recent return to Vietnam, now an alien world run by the new comrades and foreign investors. The new government had suspected and followed him. Vietnam was no longer a place of romantic tranquility where, despite a devastating war in the jungles, deltas, and villages, he could sit in a garden and recite Baudelaire to a young Vietnamese girl who looked at him with adoring eyes.

  He talked of how buildings were going up with Hong Kong style and semi-American luxury and comfort, and how the French architecture and charm that had persisted for a hundred years were gradually disappearing. How the greedy and poverty-stricken young women of Indochina who looked just like me had tried to get his money, how the new prostitutes of Vietnam had approached him—they were as young as I the day I descended from the Air France aircraft to rush into his arms in 1970.

  He talked, too, of the Asian prostitutes of Pigalle with eyes that resembled the shape of a boat lying upside down on the white sand of a deserted beach, amber skin that smelled like the tropical rain over coconut palm leaves, and pointed breasts small enough to fit in his palm, smooth and taut like a sweet green mango. He talked of the rapid deterioration of his health and good looks and spirits, so devastating that he no longer had the confidence to respond to my letters.

  He talked of how he had composed his Black Rose in the longing for the smell and feel of my skin. How he had often relived the experience of number thirteen, Rue St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, with the same surreal intensity, remembering always how it felt when I spread my legs and climbed onto him in the dark. How he had smoked and drunk and wilted away, all the time dreaming of the darkness of my eyes and hair as though the image of me was but a hallucinated vision in opium smoke. He talked, too, of all of the longing for a time when I became a woman and could be his, with all the alluring darkness of the hot and humid summer nights in Indochina, where the blondness and coolness of his wife’s hair and brows seemed so out of place.

  “Aimer et mourir. Au pays qui te ressemble. Loving and dying. In a country resembling you.”

  He talked of the unfulfilled poet, of creativity and failure. How the emptiness was so immense and the destructiveness so terrifying they killed off the will to create. And then he kissed me, his hands lingering on my cashmere coat. I could feel he was shaking. It was first a small kiss on my cheek, and then he brought his mouth to mine, his lips nervously opened and grabbed on to mine. I could not breathe, and then his darting tongue was parting my lips. It was as if he were trying to penetrate through, grasping what was left of life. The desperate neediness of someone who was close to death.

  I yielded to his wish.

  The moment seemed to last forever, yet I was too confused, fearful and overwhelmed by the course of events to feel anything real. The night was so cold and I was all covered up in the heavy coat, tired from walking on high heels, after the long day of hard work in the law office.

  When he let go, he looked deep into my eyes. Terror rose in me, because as I looked into his lifeless eyes, I could no longer find images of the nocturnal butterflies of my mother’s garden in Hue.

  He stumbled a little, waved to a cab and then disappeared inside it, leaving me with my own sadness of knowing the brown butterflies of my childhood, once hovering over my mother’s tropical flower beds, were to be buried with the still image of an angel.

  In kissing me, he had dropped his book, and I picked it up after his taxi had rolled on. It was a volume of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.

  “Je t’aime, toujours,” I said under my breath. “Attend,” my heart cried out to him.

  “Ne me quitte pas. Avons nous une dernière chance? Wait. Don’t just leave me, André. Do we still have our last chance?”

  But he could no longer hear me. Only I could hear the cry of my heart: I love you, always, André, no matter what.

  That was the last time I saw André.

  Again, I plunged into work and a superficial social life to make up for the loss. The nostalgia for André came back to me once, one early evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street. I was strolling in the museum to relax after a major corporate acquisition closing, a long, drawn-out project that had kept me sleepless many a night.

  I caught the eyes of a young man, looking at me.

  For a moment, I stopped, tottered, and almost lost my balance, as though I were seeing, again, twenty-six-year-old André walking under the magnolia tree of my childhood—dark hair, dark eyes, and an elegant, virile frame. But the young man’s face did not have the romantic, melancholy touch of André’s. Mouth too full. Nose too long. The facial skin too coarse. The young man’s countenance carried the earnest, mischievous look of a hungry anim
al looking to start a pursuit.

  His brown eyes, however, were obsessive. He was eyeing me, the curve of his mouth ready to pull into a flirtatious smile. He started a conversation, full of trite lines used a thousand times by his gender to lure a woman into a casual relationship. “My name is James. Have I met you somewhere?

  “I like art, don’t you?” he continued.

  “No,” I told him. “I prefer dinosaurs to art,” I said, imagining stuffed dinosaurs on display among medieval paintings.

  In an era of animal rights protection and activism, I was wearing a mink coat, vestige of my life as the companion of the late Christopher Sanders, part of New York City’s old money. I leaned against a railing, the coat fell open, and I displayed a glimpse of my naked thigh. I wore a short skirt and black stockings that stopped at mid-thigh. I looked twenty-eight. The young man was staring. He wanted to buy me a cup of coffee.

  At the sidewalk cafe, I discovered he would prefer reading reviews of books, rather than the books themselves. He would rather see action movies and thrillers than off-Broadway plays. He told me he wanted to write a sci-fi novel, a fantasy, or a mystery. He claimed he could produce a novel in a month by fully utilizing his engineering background. Given twelve months of unemployment, he could produce twelve novels with no sweat.

  He was everything André was not, but that day, I saw young André’s face cutting against posters of Parisian scenes—the cafe-sitters of Rive Gauche. I looked into the brown eyes of a young man named James, someone I hardly knew, and found a sense of déjà vu.